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Houses Left Behind, Pictures Taken: Memories and Legacies of the 1923 Lausanne Treaty

Eleni Kyramargiou

On October 2, 1924, in compliance with the terms of the Lausanne Treaty, the residents of Sinasos/Mustafapaşa in Central Anatolia (in the Ürgüp District of Nevşehir Province today) left their homes for Greece. As refugees displaced by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, they were fully aware that neither they nor their families would be allowed to return. Their exodus was not an abrupt, but rather a long, coordinated farewell. The residents of Sinasos had known they would have to leave since the signing of the population exchange treaty; what remained was to learn the details and the date of their departure.

Although their overall story is typical of the population exchange process, one detail sets Sinasos apart. Before their departure, the residents of Sinasos, supported by their local council, photographed their houses and community. Τhese photographs travelled with them, or even ahead of them, first to Istanbul and then, finally, to Athens where the photo album Η Σινασός: το διαμάντι της Ανατολής, 1924 [Sinasos: the diamond of Anatolia, 1924] was published at the end of 1924 (Fig. 1). This album was a conscious attempt to preserve the past, namely the history, the traditions, and the collective memory of a community which no longer exists. The photographs from ‘there’ and the short texts written by the refugees in their new ‘here’ constitute an endeavour to reconstruct their old communal life, from its history and architecture to the local dialect and the songs they used to sing (Fig. 2).

The cover of the photo album Η Σινασός: το διαμάντι της Ανατολής, 1924

Fig. 1. Christos Panagos, The cover of the photo album Η Σινασός: το διαμάντι της Ανατολής, 1924 [Sinasos: the diamond of Anatolia, 1924]  (private collection)

The first page of the photo album Η Σινασός: το διαμάντι της Ανατολής, 1924

Fig. 2. Christos Panagos, The first page of the photo album Η Σινασός: το διαμάντι της Ανατολής, 1924 [Sinasos: the diamond of Anatolia, 1924] displaying a general view of Sinasos (private collection)

This album is more than just a book. For the people of Sinasos who experienced the exodus, it is a living piece of home, while for their descendants it serves as a way to learn about their past and place of origin. For historians, the album is valuable historical evidence, not only for the information it provides, but also for the insight it offers into the historical perception and perspective of its creators, who sought to document the history of a place and community that would soon cease to exist in its original form. It is a precious object despite the fact that it did not actually come from the native land of Sinassos, but was instead made ‘here’ in order to preserve the history of a ‘there’ that had to be left behind, highlighting the multiple dimensions an object can acquire over the course of its life.

One page of the photo album Η Σινασός: το διαμάντι της Ανατολής, 1924

Fig. 3. Christos Panagos, One page of the photo album Η Σινασός: το διαμάντι της Ανατολής, 1924 [Sinasos: the diamond of Anatolia, 1924]  with photographs on the right hand and texts on the left.

The album created by the first generation of refugees from Sinassos, was one of the objects encountered during a research on the material dimensions of the population exchange experience. The initial questions were simple: what does one take in a moment of expulsion? What objects were considered valuable, useful, or symbolically important? What became of them over time? And if one can still identify these objects, what meaning do they hold for their current owners?

For the research team, the album initiated a broader investigation into the objects that Christian refugees chose to take with them at the moment of flight. More specifically: What objects did the non-exchangeable refugees who arrived in Greece after August 1922 bring with them? Did they choose objects objectively valuable, subjectively precious, or useful and practical? How many of these objects have survived to this day? When the project started, the research team believed these objects would help reconstruct the process of refugee integration into the novel setting in Greece. Eventually, it was realized that these objects have a second life: they acquire multiple meanings and generate diverse sentiments in the hands of their current owners (Kopytoff 1986, p. 64).

Clothes and personal items, jewellery and valuables, trade tools and religious icons, property deeds, documents, and letters were among the most common things that the displaced chose carry. In hastly packed bundles, they combined practical items for daily use with objects of material and emotional significance; the precious and the quotidian, side by side. To encapsulate and disseminate the findings of the research project Objects in Motion, it was decided that a digital exhibition would be the ideal medium. These objects along with the stories of both their original and current owners, highlight the intersection mobility history and material culture. As Renée Hirschon noted, these objects and the memories they carry, as well as the use of memory itself over the past 100 years, have built ‘memory bridges’ for the owners’ descendants. These bridges constructed across three generations, represent an effort to maintain continuity through time, especially when the place of origin has been irrevocably lost and memory has become ‘their most valuable property’ (Hirschon 1989, p. 15).

For the research team, Objects in Motion raised many intriguing questions on an array of issues: How do individuals construct multiple identities? How are personal recollections and, in the end, personal history shaped through second hand accounts?, More generally, how are personal narratives formed and how do they influence the big picture and the broader narrative? What symbolic meanings are attached to the ancestral house, and which memories endure across generations? Conversely, what traumas emerge from forced displacement and resettlement in unfamiliar homes? Many informants have reconstructed their ‘refugee identity’ repositioning themselves and their families within historical narratives, spanning the past, present and, possibly, the future. Kristina Gedgaudaitė describes this process as ‘viewing memory as a portable toolkit’ aptly characterizing it as ‘portable memory’ (Gedgaudaité 2021, p. 219).

These objects, alongside the stories and memories they carry, are fragments from a long and arduous population movement. This movement concluded a decade of military conflict in the Balkans, defined the national borders of Greece and Turkey, and shaped the societies of both countries. Simultaneously, thousands of people and objects crossed the Aegean in the opposite direction, as Muslim populations left Greece under the Lausanne Treaty. Monumental as it was, this was neither the first nor the last time refugees crossed the Aegean Sea. Objects do not speak for themselves. Yet they stand as resilient markers of historical moments, reminding us that even in times of crisis people make choices: they chose what is valuable, what they believe will help them face the unknown, and what they hope will carry their memories into the future.

References

Kristina Gedgaudaitė, Memories of Asia Minor in Contemporary Greek Culture. An Itinerary, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.

Renée Hirschon, Heirs of the Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Igor Kopytoff, “The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process,” in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The social life of things. Commodities in cultural perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

A Diary Across Time and Space: Elpida Castanaki, Cairo-Paris-Athens-Antibes, 1933-1963

Vivi Hatzigeorgiou

For more than thirty years, Elpida Castanaki kept a diary in French comprising 130 notebooks. A resident of Paris, she also spent a few years in Athens. Moving between Paris and Athens but also Antibes and Cairo, Elpida always carried some volumes of her diary with her, even in extreme circumstances. This multivolume diary is now part of the Castanakis archive at the Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive (ELIA) (Fig. 1 and 2).

A pile of notebooks forming part of the diary of Elpida Castanaki

Journaux Elpida Castanakis

Fig. 1 and 2. Notebooks forming part of the diary of Elpida Catanaki in pile and box at ELIA (Source: ELIA/MIET)

Elpida Castanaki was born in Cairo, on March 17, 1912, as the second of the five daughters of businessman Michalis Mavroeidis and Sappho Kanaki. In 1929, she moved to Paris to pursue literature studies at the Sorbonne. There, she met and fell in love with Thrassos Castanakis, a writer and professor at the School of Oriental Languages. A Greek from Istanbul, Thrassos was married to philologist Angela Valiadi. Despite her family’s objections, the 18-year-old Elpida, decided to commit herself to Thrassos. In the summer of 1931, they settled together in Paris.

From his years in Istanbul, Castanakis maintained a close friendship with the Prassinos family, a relationship that continued in Paris where the family had settled after fleeing what is known in Greece as “the Asia Minor Catastrophe”. The Prassinos children – poet Gisèle and painter Mario – were frequent visitors to the Castanakis home on rue Littré in Montparnasse (Fig. 3 and 4). Elpida and Thrassos affectionally referred to them as “our children.” In their will, they named Gisèle and her husband Petros Frydas, as their literary heirs. These details are drawn from the pages of Elpidas’s diary. What she could not have foreseen, however, was the fate of her diary after her death in 1963 at the age of 51. Thrassos, devastated and struggling with long-term alcoholism, passed away in 1967.

Elpida Castanaki at her desk in Paris

Elpida Kastanaki standing in her home in Paris

Fig. 3 and 4.  Elpida Castanaki at her home in Paris, c. 1935 (ELIA/MIET)

At that point, Gisèle’s husband, Frydas, gathered and organized the papers he found in the Castanakis couple’s residencies in Paris and Antibes. In 1975, he sent them to ELIA, along with a detailed catalogue. But why did Frydas choose ELIA? The extensive Castanakis archive constitutes a significant contribution to the study of Greek literature from the first half of the 20th century. ELIA remains to this date a foundation dedicated to the preservation and study of modern Greek literary and historical archives. Frydas believed that the Castanakis papers should be made available to the research in what seemed – then as now – to be their natural repository. Another factor that may influence archival donations decisions is personal connections. Frydas, an Alexandrian intellectual, was a friend and supporter of Manos Haritatos, also an Alexandrian and the founder of ELIA. The transfer of the Castanakis archive from Paris to Athens was facilitated by a bond of trust forged in Alexandria. The diary was not included in the first donation. It was only in 2017 that Catherine Prassinos, daughter of Mario Prassinos, entrusted it to ELIA. This is how Elpida’s personal journal intime was ultimately transformed into archival material, an object for study and exhibition.

Although the diary’s first entry is dated Cairo, 16 February 1929, it seems that Elpida started writing systematically after her wedding in 1933, notably at Thrassos suggestion. She recalls:

Antibes, Tuesday 21 June 1938. I stretch to re-read my diary for the years 1931 to 1933. The first two years do not exist, only a few dates and from these not all the important ones. In any case, at the time Thrassos had not suggested to me the idea and it was not from me that it would come. The year 1933 begins to turn into a real diary…. All that would have been lost and not only the events but also the words and the very ideas of Thrassos.

A typical teenage diary, marked by gaps and irregular entries, turns into a chronicle of shared life with Thrassos. Elpida assumes the role of guardian of his thoughts and expressions. Nevertheless, the diary’s importance would be greatly diminished if Thrassos were its only focus.

The Castanakis couple moved within the circles of left-wing intellectuals during pivotal moments in European history. Elpida noted the activities of each day. We observe how the French intelligentsia expressed solidarity with the Spanish Civil War, how their friends were exiled in the Greek islands under the Metaxas regime, how the Castanakis fled Paris during the June 1940 exodus. Their journey took them to the village of Monestiés near the Franco Spanish border, where they stayed for three months before undertaking a perilous route via Portugal to Greece where they finally arrived on 20 October 1940 and remained there throughout the war (Fig. 5). Elpida’s entries document not only the escalating destitution during the German occupation but also a remarkable surge in literary production, as expressed through the publication of new periodicals, books and theatrical plays. Petros Haris wrote: “if someone asked me what it is that our country produces during these difficult times I would answer, without hesitation, theatrical troupes and philological periodicals.” (Haris, 1943).

A first page listing places to which the couple and the diary travelled in 1940

Fig. 5. A first page listing places to which the couple and the diary travelled in 1940 (ELIA/MIET)

Thrassos, Elpida and a group of literary friends gathered daily at the Athenian publishing house, Pyrsos, later renamed Aetos. Among them were Varnalis, Kavvadias, Terzakis, Karagatsis, Venezis, Iakovidi, Theotokas, Evelpidis, who met to discuss collaborations, new periodicals and the course of the war.

By 1942, however, signs of exhaustion emerged. Instead of running to the nearby shelter during air raids, Elpida and Thrassos chose to stay in bed, reading War and Peace. Thrassos writes incessantly: short stories, novels, articles; he keeps the theatrical review column in Philological Sunday. Elpida translates plays and short stories from English and French. At the same time, they work hard in their farm at Helliniko, growing vegetables and raising animals that helped them survive during the famine – and friends and poor neighbours, as well.

After the war, they spend their summers in Antibes hosting friends. Thrassos, famous for his culinary skills, prepares special dishes for their guests. Yet new conflicts loomed. The Korean war, although distant, creates an upheaval in Europe. The brother of Thrassos, Loukas, is exiled in Makronisos and Ai-Stratis, along with Ritsos, Dimitris Fotiades and other friends.

The transformation of Elpida’s diary, from a private record of the domestic sphere to public archival source, available to research, raises questions about how objects can acquire a new meaning never anticipated by their creator. Furthermore, the successive transfer of the diary and archive – from Castanakis to Frydas and finally to ELIA – through relationships built on trust, highlights the essential role of interpersonal connections for the circulation and re-signification of objects.

References

Σπύρος Καράογλου, “Από την αλληλογραφία Γιώργου Θεοτοκά-Θράσου Καστανάκη. Το χρονικό μιας φιλικής σχέσης [From the correspondence of Giorgos Theotokas-Thrassos Kastanakis. The record of a friendship]”, Κονδυλοφόρος, no. 1, 2002, p. 118-173.

Αλεξάνδρα Μπουφέα, Τα λογοτεχνικά περιοδικά της Κατοχής [Literary magazines during the Occupation], Αθήνα : Σοκόλη, , 2006.

Δημήτρης Φωτιάδης, Ενθυμήματα [Memoirs],  Αθήνα : Β έκδοση, Κέδρος, 1983.

Petros Haris, «Πρωινός Τύπος» (Proinos Typos), 1st October 1943.

Jean Pierre Joshua, « Le journal comme forme littéraire et comme itinéraire de vie », Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 87, no. 4, 2003, p. 703-714.

The Transformative Journey of the Fourgon

Eirini Chryssocheri

Within the migration process, the fate of objects plays a central role, shaping a narrative of historical significance and profound meanings. In examining the role of domestic material culture in the migratory journey of Greeks who set out from Egypt to Greece in the early 1960s, the focus goes beyond the objects they transported, to capture the transformative power inherent in the containers they used to move their belongings from one country to another. The narratives of these migrants illustrate how home — in its material form and as a metaphor — can change meanings during migration.

In the early 1960s, as Greeks prepared to leave Egypt, they were granted permission to transport their household goods to Greece—a critical occasion marked by the formal declaration of their final departure (information provided from an interviewee). The choice of objects they had to take or leave behind reflected their values and priorities and symbolized the transformation they would undergo during their journey. For the Greeks from Egypt, this choice was also dictated by the practical issue of space, as the houses, at least of the upper- and middle-class families in Egypt, were larger and more spacious than their new homes in Greece.

Figure 1. Anonymous photographer, Fourgons in Athens ready for their final destination, circa 1950, Beinoglou private collection. 

Families wishing to leave Egypt sought help in organizing the transport of their possessions, which usually took place in the late hours of the night. Furniture and other items were taken to the street and loaded onto carts destined for a specific location, where everything was carefully packed with straw, sacks and sturdy ropes and got prepared for transportation. In Egypt at that time, household possessions were shipped in special containers, namely room-sized wooden boxes of various sizes, which the Greeks referred to by the French term fourgon (Figure 1). Those containers held a profound significance for those leaving Egypt as they represented the primary means for safely carrying their belongings.

The physical transfer of their possessions, as their households made their way from Egypt to Greece, marked the beginning of a complex and multidimensional process. Upon reaching Greece, the wooden containers found themselves in the hands of local carriers, responsible for distributing and placing the possessions within the migrants’ new homes. After reaching their final destination, the containers commonly met one of two fates: either being discarded, especially if damaged, or being offered to the transportation company in Greece.

The migration journey of the Greeks from Egypt, as reflected in their domestic material culture, provides deep insights into the complexities of carrying one’s sense of home across borders. While the act of leaving their former homes in Egypt was undoubtedly an emotional and challenging endeavor, the process of furnishing their new homes in Greece was a profound act of self-preservation, allowing them to maintain a tangible connection to their past lives, creating a bridge between Egypt and Greece

At the heart of the migration process, however, was the in-between stage of transporting their household goods from Egypt to Greece. In the collective imagination of those migrants – vividly depicted in their narratives – the large shipping containers used for this purpose, emerge as powerful metaphors and symbols. They stand not just as mere physical vessels for belongings; they embody the very “essence of home”, the heart of their former residence. The significance of using the French term fourgon to address them, cannot be overstated. While their containers were stationary wooden boxes of room-like size, reminiscent of a house, the term fourgon in the French language refers to a truck, a wheeled vehicle for the transportation of people or goods. This choice of terminology adds a layer of metaphorical depth, emphasizing the transformative nature of these containers. Just like the migrants themselves, these “moving homes,” cross borders, functioning as symbolic representations of their migratory journey from one country to another.

Figure 2. (From left to right), Crane lorry transports the fourgon to the family’s property ; From container to holiday-“home” ; The converted fourgon by the sea (1962, private collection).

Tracing the fate of a particular fourgon that arrived from Egypt in 1962 (Figure 2), laden with the household goods of a wealthy Greek-Alexandrian family, reveals a remarkable account that further highlights the dynamic nature of home as a concept. After arriving in Athens and having achieved its purpose of safely transporting the family’s belongings, this container met a different fortune from the rest of the containers in question. Instead of being abandoned by its owners, as was the norm, it was kept and treated as an object with the potential to fulfill a new role. Having furnished their new home in Athens, the family also wanted to build a retreat in the countryside. The container was therefore seen as the perfect solution. After being suitably modified — windows were opened on both sides and an additional roof was installed — it was transported by lorry to the family’s property in an area outside Athens and was transformed into a fully habitable holiday home.

This is a vivid example of how a simple wooden box, originally intended to carry a family’s belongings, was transformed into a vessel of continuity that adapted to new roles and meanings. Reflecting on the migration journey of Greeks from Egypt and their profound connection to home, the fate of this container stands as a poignant reminder that home is not confined to a fixed location. Instead, it is a dynamic, evolving, and adaptable concept. It can be transported across geographic boundaries, reimagined in new environments, and reconstructed in new homelands.

This post is based on ethnographic data. For a more comprehensive understanding of the topic, the following bibliography offers further insights.

Boccagni, Paolo & Brighenti, Andrea M., « Immigrants and home in the making: thresholds of domesticity, commonality and publicness »,  Journal of Housing and the Built Environment32, 2017; p.1-11.

Dalachanis, Angelos, The Greek Exodus from Egypt: Diaspora Politics and Emigration, 1937-1962, New York: Berghahn, 2017.

Horst, Heather. A., « Reclaiming Place: The Architecture of Home, Family and Migration », Anthropologica: Journal of the Canadian Anthropological Society 53, n° 1, 2011, p. 29-39.

Ling, Minhua, « Container Housing: Formal Informality and Deterritorialized Home-Making amid Bulldozer Urbanism in Shanghai », Urban Studies 58, n° 6, 2021, p. 1141-1157.

Morley, David. Communications and Mobility: The Migrant, the Mobile Phone, and the Container Box, Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2017.